


A Field of Poppies

by yuutsuhime



Series: Snowbound [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Parent Death, Post-World War I, Robot/Human Relationships, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:00:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24636457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: A woman and her robot inamorata watch the clouds from an overgrown battlefield.
Relationships: Ava Delta-509/Ately Dressler
Series: Snowbound [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718800
Kudos: 3





	A Field of Poppies

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little tidbit I found from a while ago.

Ava and I turn to look at each other through the dying, sideways stalks; the dirt is cold against the skin of my cheek. The threat of winter sits heavy in the bottom of my stomach, like the rock I swallowed when I was seven and in a different field. _She has to vomit,_ my mother had stressed, but my dad just laughed and told me the rock would grow into a mountain inside of me. _Like when you swallow seeds, you'll grow a flower out of your mouth,_ he said, his eyes shimmering with mirth.

My girlhood was spent in fields, breathing in pollen and smearing my face with dirt for my mother to clean off with a hot rag in the evenings. She'd cup my ears in her rough baker's hands until the cold didn't sting and maybe that's what made winter afraid live inside me. How every flower's death was just a promise to bloom again next year, for me to pluck or stomp on or give to another girl. How even the winter was ephemeral.

"Are you cold?" Ava says.

"A little," I say.

Ava responds by wrapping her body sideways around mine. Ava's arms are hard metal beneath her felt coat; the heat from her core carried through hydraulics until it chills in her fingertips in what mechanics call an _inefficient system_ , and we call blood. Maybe this is the metaphor that compelled me to lie here — how I'm a woman and my father is the poppies; how Ava is the blood; the rusting hulks of tanks are just metal, the barbed wire is just a fence, the damp is just old rain and changing seasons. I turn onto my back.

"What does that one look like?" I ask, my voice small and lazy.

"A cloud," Ava says.

"I think it looks a bit like a wrapped bread."

"I suppose breads also tend to take puffy, globular forms," Ava says.

"Hence the simile."

"Literary-minded as always," Ava chides. "Are you hungry for baked goods?"

"I'm thinking about my mom."

"Ah," says Ava, pressing her forehead into the side of my head, close enough that I hear the tiny motors in her processor clicking across her memory. Maybe my mind would make the same sound if it could be heard. A breeze shifts across the field and I think about how the back of my coat is becoming a patchwork of compost and dried leaves and how that's the field's own form of embrace that I'll brush ungratefully onto the stoop of our flat in a few hours. I think about how if a loaf of bread was love then what would it make a crumb? And what would it mean to brush that onto the ground, too?

"I'm glad you're here with me," I say.

"Me too," Ava says.

When we leave the field, we don't braid poppies into our hair. We don't visit a bakery on the way back. Maybe what we feel is just survival: raw, and guilty.


End file.
